A Better Finder Rename 10 beta auto-update broken on 10.11 El Capitan

We are sorry to report that the auto-update feature on beta releases of A Better Finder Rename 10 is broken on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan and you will need to download the update to version 10 (out yesterday) directly from our website.

We noticed this early at 6AM yesterday while checking the A Better Finder Rename 10.00 release and shipped a fixed version at 9AM (after struggling through work traffic) both GMT+1.

We have over time evolved a build process that guarantees that we only ship high-quality product builds, but we were caught out his time by the rapid pace of change imposed by Apple’s frequent Mac OS X and Xcode updates.

In the past, Apple was quite good about letting developers upgrade their development environments at their own pace, which is important because Mac users do not expect to always have to upgrade their Macs as soon as a new Mac OS X release is dropped. More recently, Apple has transferred a lot of its iOS practises to Mac OS X and have started really pushing developers to adopt features quickly and to get rid of backwards compatibility quickly.

At first this took the form of a gentle prodding, but over time it has become much more aggressive. Essentially they are deliberatley making it hard for developers not to drop support for older OS X versions.

We were caught out in this and still are. We had to install 10.11 on our development machines in order to test on El Capitan properly (the remote debugger has been discontinued for a while now), which lead to an auto-update of Xcode 7.

We had for the past decade built our products using the latest Xcode but using the oldest compatible SDK (in this case 10.7), because this ensures that the builds do not break backwards compatibility for customers on older OS X releases.

We were caught by the fact that Xcode 7 quietly drops the ability to work with older SDKs. Unfortunately building to the 10.11 SDK opts the program into a new rule that the program can only read HTTPS streams for security reasons. This was mentioned at WWDC for iOS applications but OS X hardly gets a mention in those talks. In any event, we did not think that this would affect A Better Finder Rename as we have no server backend, but as it happens, it breaks Sparkle auto-updates, which power our product’s (and 99% of non-Mac App Store applications’) auto-update feature. Note that our auto-updates are securely signed even thought they do not use https.

As a result the auto-update feature works fine as long as you are not on 10.11, but no longer works on 10.11. We only found this out when we shipped the first update since users have started installing 10.11, resulting in a minor but real mess where A Better Finder Rename beta cannot auto-update.